The words I have italicised are interesting as exactly defining the principle of all imprisonment for debt. A wage earner to-day who runs up bills with tally-men and grocers obtains credit upon the security of his body.
I have heard from the wife of a poor debtor an apt but unconscious translation of the Latin maxim, Si non habet in aere luat in corpore. Her allegation was that a tally-man had said to her husband, “If I canna ’ave yer brass I’ll tek yer body.” In the north country, among the more old-fashioned bailiffs and their victims, warrants of arrest are commonly known as “body warrants.” No doubt the imprisonment of to-day is different in degree from the slavery of debtors in Greece five hundred years before Christ, but it is absolutely the same in principle, founded on the same idea, and worthy to be maintained or abolished by the citizens of this State for the same reasons that were found good by the citizens of Athens.
Thus it is that it is worth while finding out what Solon thought about it. I wish Solon’s tract, “What the Archon Saw,” had come down to us, and we could have quoted actual instances of the wickedness of imprisonment for debt in his day, but at least we know what he thought of it, and, what is really important to us, what he did. Solon had a pretty wit in titles. He called his bill Seisachtheia, or the shaking off of burdens. The relief which it afforded was complete and immediate. It cancelled at once all those contracts in which the debtor had borrowed on the security of his person or his land; it forbade all future loans or contracts in which the person of the debtor was pledged as security; it deprived the creditor in future of all power to imprison or enslave or extort work from his debtor, and confined him to an effective judgment at law, authorising the seizure of the property of the latter.
This was indeed a shaking off of burdens. For here we find, not only was imprisonment for debt abolished lock, stock and barrel, but a law enacted protecting the land of the cultivator from being seized for debt. This is akin to what in some of our colonies is called a homestead law, and I have always contended that in the interests of the State the few sticks of furniture which a poor man and his wife and children always call “the home” should be protected from arrest for debt, just as the bread-winner’s body should be exempt from imprisonment. I could have got along with Solon.
And when one is told the old tale that continues to be put forward by those who wish to retain imprisonment for debt—that the workman will starve for want of necessary credit and that trade will stagnate owing to timid creditors refusing to trade—let us remember with pleasure that that was not what the Archon saw as a result of his beneficial measures. On the contrary, the testimony is overwhelming that there grew up a higher and increasing respect for the sanctity of contracts. The system of credit-giving, and especially of moneylending, assumed a more beneficial character, and “the old noxious contracts, mere snares for the liberty of a poor free man and his children”—the flat-traps of to-day—disappeared. What happened was what will happen here when we abolish this degrading system of giving credit on the sanction of body warrants. What happened in Athens was that, although there were some fraudulent debtors, the public sentiment became strongly in favour of honesty, and it is agreed that the prophecies of Solon’s failure were not made good, and “that a loan of money at Athens was quite as secure as it ever was at any time or place of the ancient world.” Furthermore, it is acknowledged by the better authorities that what I expect and believe will happen in the mean streets of England when imprisonment for debt is abolished, actually did happen in Athens, and, to use Grote’s words, “the prohibition of all contracts on the security of the body was itself sufficient to produce a vast improvement in the character and conditions of the poorer population.”
Of course, I am not putting forward “What the Archon Did” as an example to the Archons who Didn’t of to-day. The theory of evolution teaches us that in two thousand years the Solon type must have improved, and that the Solon that we see in the latter-day armchair of State must be a far, far better thing than anything that obtained in Ancient Greece. Possibly, the world having no use at all for Solons, the type is extinct. Be that as it may, I am more than ever puzzled since I have studied the records of What the Archon Did. If the world had got so far in the question of imprisonment for debt five hundred years before Christ, why are we where we are now nineteen hundred years since the Master set before us the true doctrine of forgiveness of debts?
The Roman laws against the debtor upon which we have ultimately modelled our own were equally harsh and would nearly satisfy the moneylender or tally-man of any age. Upon notice, a debtor had thirty days in which to discharge his debt. If he did not do so his creditor carried him off in chains. Note, however, that he was not a slave, but his creditor had to keep him in chains for another sixty days, during which time he had to bring the debtor out on three successive market days to give his friends an opportunity of paying up and releasing him. The creditor had also to provide the debtor with a pound of bread a day. In these socialist days we take that burden off the creditor’s shoulder and a generous State feeds the imprisoned debtor at the cost of the community. On the third market day, if the debtor’s friends were still backward in coming forward, the debtor was killed and thrown into the Tiber, or his body was divided among his creditors, which was the only dividend they received. If there was any market for him he was sold into slavery. It seems that in the very early days of Ancient Rome each creditor had a right to carve his pound of flesh from off the debtor. Portia’s point against Shylock:
... nor cut thou less, nor more,
But just a pound of flesh:...
was foreseen and provided for in the drafting of the Twelve Tables. It is enacted in the Third Table: “After the third market day the creditors may cut their several portions of his body: and any one that cuts more or less than his just share shall be guiltless.” Unless, therefore, the laws of Venice amended or repealed the Twelve Tables, Shylock’s case seems to have been wrongly decided. What is at least curious is that the ancient idea of debtor and creditor law embodied in those ancient statutes should be the foundation of one of the most popular plays in the English language.
Some good people have found a difficulty in understanding Shylock’s outlook on life and cannot comprehend why a creditor should enjoy killing a debtor. But, after all, it is equally strange why a creditor should take pleasure in imprisoning a debtor. Yet to-day thousands of debtors go to prison because they have not means to pay their creditors. The difference between killing and imprisoning a debtor is a difference in degree only. The principle is the same. The object of the creditor is, perhaps, in the first place, to get repaid his debt; when he finds this is impossible the death or imprisonment of the debtor merely satisfies his desire for revenge. The ancient Romans were, in one way, a more practical people than ourselves, for they threw the costs of this revenge direct upon the creditor, whereas we throw it upon the taxpayer. If this particular impost were made upon me in any direct manner it would almost persuade me to be a passive resister.